Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior

Joon Sung Park

Stanford University

Stanford, USA

joonspk@stanford.edu

Joseph C. O’Brien

Stanford University

Stanford, USA

jobrien3@stanford.edu

Carrie J. Cai

Google Research

Mountain View, CA, USA

cjcai@google.com

Meredith Ringel Morris

Google DeepMind

Seattle, WA, USA

merrie@google.com

Percy Liang

Stanford University

Stanford, USA

pliang@cs.stanford.edu

Michael S. Bernstein

Stanford University

Stanford, USA

msb@cs.stanford.edu

Figure 1: Generative agents are believable simulacra of human behavior for interactive applications. In this work, we demonstrate

generative agents by populating a sandbox environment, reminiscent of The Sims, with twenty-five agents. Users can observe

and intervene as agents plan their days, share news, form relationships, and coordinate group activities.

ABSTRACT

Believable proxies of human behavior can empower interactive

applications ranging from immersive environments to rehearsal

spaces for interpersonal communication to prototyping tools. In

this paper, we introduce generative agents: computational software

agents that simulate believable human behavior. Generative agents

wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while

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UIST ’23, October 29-November 1, 2023, San Francisco, CA, USA

© 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-0132-0/23/10.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3586183.3606763

authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate

conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan

the next day. To enable generative agents, we describe an architec-

ture that extends a large language model to store a complete record

of the agent’s experiences using natural language, synthesize those

memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them

dynamically to plan behavior. We instantiate generative agents

to populate an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The

Sims, where end users can interact with a small town of twenty-five

agents using natural language. In an evaluation, these generative

agents produce believable individual and emergent social behav-

iors. For example, starting with only a single user-specified notion

that one agent wants to throw a Valentine’s Day party, the agents

autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two

arXiv:2304.03442v2 [cs.HC] 6 Aug 2023